


An MIT-era friendship fic from a simpler, pre-Endgame time

by taylor_tut



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark Friendship, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark at MIT, MIT Era, Protective James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Sick Character, Sick Tony Stark, Sickfic, Tony Stark Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 19:58:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18835714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: This was a commission for a friend from my tumblr! The prompt was for an MIT-era Tony getting sick and being taken care of by Rhodey, who doesn’t know that he’s allergic to a medication in the flu pills he gives him.





	An MIT-era friendship fic from a simpler, pre-Endgame time

Tony had not had a relaxing winter break.

In fact, it had been more stressful than just staying at MIT and working in the lab when his professors weren’t looking like he’d originally planned. 

Why was it always finals week when he got his best ideas? He’d been in the middle of a semester review session when one line about space or gravity or relativity or  _ something _ , he wasn’t even quite sure what the inception had been anymore, had been like opening a door in his mind. That happened sometimes—a small stimulus could flood his brain with so many thoughts all at once that sometimes it felt like a migraine—and suddenly he was off in a world all his own. He’d scribbled down a few symbols in his tablet so he didn’t forget them on the walk back to his dorm, packed up his stuff, and left the lecture hall, ignoring the adjunct professor that didn’t know him well enough to understand that calling after him was futile because when Tony got like this, he barely even registered anything outside his own mind.

Rhodey had found him hunched over his desk three hours later when he’d come back from his shift in the academic resource center, where he tutored, and had asked him if he wanted to go get dinner. Tony hadn’t replied, nor had he eaten the two slices of pizza that Rhodey smuggled out of the cafeteria for him.

That had been how things had gone for all of finals week. Rhodey would bring Tony food, which he’d sometimes nibble at but only really eat every few days when his hunger became so pressing that he couldn’t think through it, so he’d guzzle down as many cups of instant noodles as his stomach would hold before getting right back to work. He’d stopped sleeping almost entirely in favor of dozing off for an hour or two in his chair from time to time, and if Rhodey hadn’t gotten him a crazy-straw and a gallon jug of water, he’d probably be in the hospital by now. While he was no stranger to Tony’s creativity-fueled hazes, he’d never seen him go this hard before. 

That was why Rhodey had insisted that Tony take his mother’s invitation and spend Christmas with his family. As much as he’d argued, even Tony couldn’t deny that, between his finals and his personal projects, he was exhausted. It had only taken a little bit of strong-arming to get him to agree to go home for the holidays. 

 

Rhodey had expected Tony to return well-rested and ready to face a new semester. Perhaps that was a bit naive of him, knowing both how Tony was and how his father treated him. A week before he expected Tony back, Rhodey’s  _ Cheers _ marathon was interrupted by the sound of keys jingling in the door, fumbling for a long time before hitting the ground. A curse followed, and Rhodey hopped down from his bed excitedly. He’d grown bored of being alone quickly, so having his best friend back was exciting. 

“Hey, Tony,” Rhodey greeted as he tossed the door open, expecting to see him fumbling with the door because he was trying to hold his bags but instead finding himself face to face with an empty-handed, pale-looking Tony. A single rolling suitcase sat next to him, but the dropping of the keys had apparently been unrelated. 

“Rhodey,” he replied tiredly but not unenthusiastically. “How’s break?” 

“Uh, it’s fine,” Rhodey said, caught slightly off guard. “What are you doing back so early?”

Tony shrugged. “Homesick, I guess,” he said, a hint of the teasing smile Rhodey was used to playing at his lips. He couldn’t help but smile back, ushering Tony inside and pulling his suitcase in after him when Tony all but forgot about it. 

A few steps inside the room saw Tony faceplanting into Rhodey’s mattress, too lazy to climb the ladder up to his own loft. He sighed. 

“At least take your shoes off,” he instructed. Tony kicked both of his shoes off with his feet without so much as glancing up, so Rhodey picked them up and set them by the door with his own. “How was seeing your family?” he asked tentatively. From Tony’s demeanor, he wasn’t expecting a rave review, but rather than launching into some kind of dramatic story about his dad or even just a deflection to a different topic, he groaned, not bothering to lift his head up from the covers. Rhodey chuckled.

“That bad, huh?” he asked. Tony shook his head. 

“Don’t want to talk about it,” he said, his voice muffled by the blankets. He hadn’t taken his coat off yet, but still, he shivered once dramatically. “Fuck, Rhodey-bear, you really turned the thermostat down while I was gone, didn’t you?”

Rhodey rolled his eyes at the nickname and shook his head. “I didn’t touch it,” he maintained. “Your coat is just cold from the snow. Here,” he offered, fighting Tony for the thick, wool coat for only a moment before he won and took it from him, then hung the slightly-drippy garment in the closet where it belonged. On the way back to Tony, he wrestled the warmest fleece blanket from his bed. “You’re really a piece of work, you know that?” Rhodey joked, tossing the blanket over Tony to warm him up. However, the jest didn’t elicit the response he expected—instead of a cheeky smile and a remark about how much Rhodey loves him, he stiffened. 

“Yeah, I’ve heard all about how much of an inconvenience I am,” he snapped, “so you can save it.”

Rhodey blinked. “I was kidding,” he defended. “Seriously, do you need to talk about—”

“I probably need to talk about a lot of things,” Tony admitted, not without some bite to his tone, “but I don’t  _ want _ to. Hop off my dick.”

Rhodey took a step back, putting his hands up in a resigned gesture. “Okay,” he finally said, “Jesus. Maybe you should just go to sleep. You’re crabby as hell and you need a nap.” 

Normally, a statement like that would have been taken as a challenge, but this time, it deflated him a little bit. Tony seemed to nod, shuffling in the covers to pull away from the bed and opting instead for just rolling onto his back. Rhodey looked him up and down and sighed—he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt; not the most comfortable pyjamas he could find, but at least it was better than all the times he’d stumbled back to the dorm dead on his feet in a three-piece suit after some networking event that he forced his way into.

“You want my bed for the night?” Rhodey asked, and Tony didn’t even reply, just nuzzled further beneath the covers as a grateful affirmative. That, too, was unsurprising, as Tony often worked until he rag-dolled and then didn’t have the energy to climb the ladder into his own bed, so Rhodey would switch with him for a night. Honestly, he probably spent about as many nights in Rhodey’s bed as he did face-down on his desk or in a chair at the library, all of which were more common than sleeping in his actual bed. 

“Thanks, Rhodey-bear,” he slurred, already half asleep. “Sorry for being bitchy.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he dismissed. “Just get some sleep, okay? If you wake up before noon tomorrow, maybe we’ll go to a museum or something. They’re less busy this time of year, since the students are mostly gone. Sound fun?”

Tony hesitated, nodded, then shook his head. “I’ve got to work,” he maintained.

“Classes don’t start for another week,” he pointed out. “You’ve got time.”

“Not on school. On physics.”

Rhodey rolled his eyes. “You mean whatever crackpot project you were balls-deep into when you left to go home?” he asked. “You haven’t finished it yet?” 

Tony shook his head again, then winced. “It’s gonna take some time,” he admitted. “It’s kind of a big deal. I’ve sort of got this theory. I think—well, I’ll sound crazy if I say it.”

“You always sound crazy,” Rhodey pointed out. 

“Hey, now,” he fought tiredly. “Genius is always mistaken for madness in its infancy.” 

“What’s the theory, Tony?” he asked, losing patience and interest quickly. 

“I think… time travel might be, like, possible.” 

Rhodey paused for a long moment, staring at Tony, before throwing his head back and laughing. 

“Good one,” he cackled, “but what is it, really?” One look at Tony’s face revealed that his reaction had been inappropriate. “You’re serious.”

“Dead.”

Rhodey was still wiping tears from his eyes at the idea that this 19-year-old  _ baby _ who he was pretty confident might be a robot powered by coffee and programmed to argue with professors (and win) thought that he was going to be the guy who figured out how to jump through time, but he didn’t have the heart to show it. 

“Get some sleep, Tony,” he instructed again, this time feeling a little more concerned about the dark circles under his eyes that he was just noticing now that Tony was making direct eye contact with him and the fact that really, he probably should have stopped shivering ten minutes ago in the warmth of their dorm room. “You show me the math, I’ll find someone to hook you up with a Delorian for your time machine.” 

Tony cracked an exhausted smile, sniffled, and rolled over to face the wall. 

Hell, maybe it was crazy, but if anyone could figure out the impossible, he hadn’t yet given Rhodey a reason to doubt that it was Tony Stark. 

 

Rhodey had been staying up pretty late recently, as one of the best parts of breaks was getting to sleep in, so it was well after midnight when he finally went to bed. It was rare for the lights in their dorm to be completely off and to hear Tony snoring concurrently—normally, if Tony was present in the room at night, he still had his desk lamp on by the time Rhodey turned in. It made him feel like he could rest a little easier, knowing that Tony 

At nearly four in the morning, Rhodey wasn’t sure what woke him up, but was immediately unsettled. He sat up in bed and listened quietly for a long moment before he heard it again: the sound of whimpering. 

Tony was crying out in his sleep, making little, restrained whines from the back of his throat. 

A nightmare, probably, Rhodey assumed with a sigh. 

“Tony,” he called quietly, hoping it wouldn’t startle him. When he didn’t wake up, he tried a little louder. “Tony, wake up.”

He tried not to feel annoyed as he got up to wake him manually, nearly falling off the bed by swinging his legs over the side before he remembered that he was in Tony’s loft and readjusting so he could climb down the ladder. 

Tony was twitching in his sleep. Though Rhodey couldn’t see his face terribly clearly, the faint streetlight’s glow that streamed in through the window was enough to illuminate a pained expression, one in which his eyebrows were knit together and his jaw was tight. 

“Tones, come on; you’re dreaming,” he said gently, the irritation from a moment ago forgotten. Something about actually seeing Tony’s face always melted his heart and he could never stay mad no matter how much of a pain in the ass Tony could be. 

When that didn’t work either, he felt a seed of worry begin to take root in his stomach. Tony was a heavy sleeper, when he slept, but usually not this bad. 

Rhodey reached out and tapped the bedside lamp to turn it on, which only made him more concerned. Now, he was able to see that Tony’s face was not only still pale, but flushed and slightly sweaty, a heat that had likely been covered up by the cold of the winter air outside. Bundling him up in all the room’s blankets might have been the worst thing he could have done for him.

He didn’t waste more time trying to wake Tony gently. Now, he reached out for his shoulder and shook it as lightly as he could while still getting the point across, wincing when he felt the heat that had become trapped in the blanket burrito Tony had enrobed himself inside and the dampness of his shirt. Tony woke up slowly and then completely, with a startled, choked gasp that turned into a deep cough. He struggled to sit up and press himself into the corner as his eyes darted around the room with no familiarity, then resting on Rhodey, still wide and panicked but seeming to calm a bit. Rhodey could hear the congestion in his chest as he hyperventilated. 

“Tony, it’s okay,” he reassured quietly. “You’re in the dorm room; it’s the middle of the night.” Tony nodded, seeming to understand what he was saying, even if he did still appear a bit frantic. 

“Yeah,” he agreed, like he was trying to believe it himself, “yeah. Okay.” 

Rhodey sat down next to him on the bed and pat his knee gently. “You good now?” he asked, and Tony nodded. “Did you have a nightmare?” 

At that, Tony stiffened, nodded, and rubbed his face hard with both hands. While his hands were still covering his face, he coughed, deep and painful-sounding. It went on for a few moments too long for Rhodey’s liking, surpassing “just a cold” and making him worry about what kind of hell-bug his friend had picked up. 

“Are you feeling alright?” he asked, reaching forward to press his hand to Tony’s forehead when he finally put his own arms down to huddle back under the blanket.

“I’m fine,” Tony said so quickly that Rhodey was sure it was a reflex.

“You sure about that?” he asked. He fixed the blankets when Tony struggled to do it himself. “You’re running pretty hot.” When Tony didn’t look like he was going to admit to anything, he sighed and got up to rummage through their bathroom cabinet, hoping that they had a thermometer in it to get a read on the definite fever he’d felt burning Tony’s skin. From the other room, he heard Tony coughing again and winced, grabbing the box of Nyquil and a cup of water in addition to the thermometer. 

“This, first,” he instructed, putting the thermometer into his hand and glaring until Tony reluctantly put it into his mouth and pressed the button. At the beep, Rhodey removed it before Tony could touch it, frowning at the number. 

“Jesus, Tones,” he muttered, “103.2. Why didn’t you tell me before you went to bed?”

Tony shrugged. “I didn’t… I was fine before—”

“—Bullshit,” he cut him off, “but it’s fine.” He was a guarded young man, one who had a lot of trust issues that didn’t need to be challenged for the first time while his brain was cooking. “Let’s just worry about getting that fever down, okay?” He pressed two pills into Tony’s palm and handed him the water. 

Tony choked down the medicine past a sore throat and Rhodey cursed under his breath at the fact that student health services were closed for break. He’d have to take him to Urgent Care tomorrow—hell, if the pills didn’t bring the fever down a bit, he might bring him to the ER tonight. Tony got sick fairly often, as someone who barely ate or slept and spent all his time in the library, but Rhodey had never seen him ill with anything worse than a migraine or a bad cold in the semester he’d shared a room with him. 

When he glanced back at Tony, he was pressing the heel of his hand to his eye, massaging it gently. 

“Head hurt?” Rhodey asked, and Tony chuckled a wheezy laugh. 

“Everything hurts,” he replied. 

“Probably the fever,” he said. “The pills will help.” He coaxed the water cup back to Tony’s mouth, knowing that he was bad about drinking water even when he wasn’t sick, so there was no doubt that he was dehydrated now. He helped Tony sit back against the pillows and swatted his arm when he shut his eyes. “I don’t want you to go back to sleep until we get that fever down,” he said. “Just to make sure we don’t have to go to the hospital tonight.” 

Tony nodded and reached, as if instinctively, for his file of paperwork. There was always work to be done, and he tried very hard to focus on it, but Rhodey could tell that he was merely staring at the screen rather than reading the words. 

After a few minutes, he began to get agitated again. At first, Rhodey thought that he might be simply too hot from the fever, as he started shifting and fidgeting under the blankets and attempting to shove them off his body, but when he began to help him peel back the blankets, his heart sank as he took note of the angry, red welts that had began to form on Tony’s arms and neck. 

“What the hell,” he muttered, taking one of Tony’s arms and rotating it under the lamp to get a better look. Hives, he realized with dismay, were running all down his arms. 

“It’s itchy,” Tony complained, and Rhodey nodded. 

“Sorry,” he apologized roughly. “Anywhere other than your arms?” 

“My back,” he returned. He coughed once and when he inhaled, the sound was a high-pitched wheeze, this time sounding more like he was breathing through a coffee straw. 

“Shit, shit, shit,” Rhodey cursed, trying his hardest to remain calm but something about Tony was just  _ different _ and made him susceptible to panic. “Are you allergic to any medications?” he asked, and Tony nodded. 

“Ibuprofen,” he rasped, inhaling a rattling, choked breath and holding it until his cheeks turned a horrible reddish-purple, then coughed it back out and began the fight for the next breath. 

Rhodey felt stupid for even checking the box, but he scrambled to read the ingredients on the flu tablets he’d chosen and cursed again when he found Ibuprofen listed there. 

“Tony, hey, stay with me,” he ordered, watching as Tony’s tired, now slightly swollen eyes snapped back to attention. “Do you have an epi pen?” 

Tony nodded and got up to get it, but staggered dizzily as soon as he was upright, swaying so hard that he nearly took a bite of the nightstand, would have done so if Rhodey hadn’t been there to catch him under the arms. With Tony so malleable in his arms, he could really feel the heat pouring off him and decided then and there that he was taking him to the ER tonight.

“Where do you keep it?” he asked, rummaging through the drawers before Tony could even reply. He followed his vague, lazy hand gesture to Tony’s sock drawer, of all places, and had to tear out everything that was inside in order to find the stupid thing. A quick once-over of the instructions was all he needed to understand before he flew back to Tony and jabbed him in the thigh with the epi pen. His shoulders relaxed as he heard Tony breathe in a rattling, deep, desperate breath, hungry and relieved. He coughed, both from the air-hunger and whatever crap was in his lungs from the bug he was fighting, so Rhodey rubbed his back gently. It was a touch that Tony would normally reject harshly, and the fact that he was leaning into it now was a testament to how poorly he must be feeling. 

“You okay, now?” Rhodey asked softly when Tony finally got his breath back a little. Tony nodded even though that definitely wasn’t true, but the fact that he was at least coherent again was still better than nothing. “Jesus, Tony. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know—”

“Stop,” Tony cut him off. “You didn’t know. Didn’t do anything wrong. S’okay.” Tony coughed again, roughly, into his elbow, and moaned. 

“Tony?” he asked, already fishing around for where he’d put his keys because it was time to throw in the towel and drive him to the hospital. “Talk to me, man. How ya doin’?”

“Nauseous,” he replied. Rhodey took the small trash can from the corner of the room and emptied the papers from it before thrusting it into Tony’s lap. 

“The ER will give you something for that,” he said. 

“I don’t need—”

“—Yeah, no,” Rhodey curtailed. “We’re not arguing about this.” Tony rubbed at his eyes, which were red and irritated from the reaction, and Rhodey sighed. “I’d really feel better if you got checked out.”

Tony sighed, but predictably, guilting him worked, and he caved. 

“Fine,” he agreed, a bit petulantly. Rhodey wrapped him in his still-damp raincoat and helped him with his shoes, not bothering to ask because he knew Tony would lie and say he could do it himself. He still seemed reluctant to go, leaning heavily on Rhodey as he helped him up and guided him out of the small dorm room. He clung to the trash can still, and though the look on his face was anything but eager, he muttered, “thank you,” under his breath so quietly that he wasn’t even totally sure he heard it. 

“I’ve got you,” Rhodey decided to say, gripping Tony just a little tighter and feeling comforted knowing that they were going to get him some fluids and medicine and some real, honest to goodness rest. 


End file.
